Thank you to each and every one of you who participate with us in The Teilhard de Chadin Project. At a time of Thanksgiving, we recollect that the wonder of the world in its continuous becoming was a never-ending marvel for Teilhard, and a source of gratitude.
The spirit of that gratitude finds expression in his Mass on the World, which he had first drafted in 1915, but which he put in a new and fuller form in the summer of 1923. He and fellow Jesuit Emile Licent had arrived at Chara-Ousso-Gol (today Salawusu), which he described in a letter to his friend Abbé Breuil. “We camped at the bottom of a winding canyon carved out in the steppes to a depth of 250 feet by the Chara-Ousso-Gol, whose waters — liquid mud — gurgled beside us over a stony bed.”
Pictured here, the vast yellow sands of the Ordos desert can be seen above the gorge of Salawusu today. Beholding this at sunrise Teilhard was inspired to write:
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